What a big disapointment. unfortunately it's rubbish

[yealf]

I just bought S.I. Was really hoping it would be useful.
In my opinion this box has been fundimentally ill concieved. It has been rendered virtually useless to me by the decision to use tiny little samples.
I file this under "what were they thinking!" RAM and disk space have never been cheaper. Why make such tiny samples? some of the solo wind are 1meg! Everyone who has ever used orchestral samples realizes pretty quickly that you need as much detail as possible, long samples and as many of them as possible. The other key fact is that you need very good players, recorded by very good engineers.
SI exibits none of this.
Take the solo strings for example. The Cello sounds very nasal and thin. lt has a very heavy souless vibrato. I put it up against an old prosonus Akai S1000 sample and the difference was huge. The prosonus was clearly a very good player the vibrato and tone of the cello were wonderful, just added life to the track. the SI just made the track sound cheap and nasty.
SI sounds just slightly better than the orchestral card in a Roland JV 1080. The people who designed this are completely out of touch.
What a shame. $300 down the drain

[yealf]

As a foot note I would just say that I was considering buying Ethno but based on MOTU's SI design, I wouldn't touch it.
SI is not a serious tool for people involved in any kind of professional sampled orchestral production.

[buddhabelly]

There is a reason why there are libraries that cost thousands, not hundreds of dollars. For it's price, it is pretty damn good and the only options in the similar range is Miraslov and GPO. I don't like the way GPO sounds, nor how it works as an instrument.

I like SI, but I'm a poor, recently graduated student.

[papageno]

some of the solo wind are 1meg!

Turn off the streaming feature for the part (expert mode), then you will see full size, not just preloaded part.

I tend to agree with you. Orchestral library that I got with Kontakt2 is much better. There is also instrument range issue with MSI, still not fixed.

As soon as Kontakt2 will go to Universal Binary, I'll switch back to it. For now MSI is the only UB Orchestral sample player (exept Vienna Instrument$$$).

[meeloo]

I see at least a big flaw in your diatribe:
As a professional composer your should have learned from experience that to judge a sample lib by the size of its samples is wrong in many cases. I think a better way to look at this is to have a look correlation of sound quality vs lib size.

Concerning the ranges: while I agree that it is sad not to have the full ambitus of the modern instruments, I also think that most concert instruments are meant to be played in their natural voice if you want them to sound good. A clarinet *can* play very high notes often sound bad, so most of the time, choosing another instrument to play the part is probably a better solution . (and some of those sounds should really be forbidden because harfull, like ultra high clarinet pitches )

my 0.02•‚¬

[papageno]

I also think that most concert instruments are meant to be played in their natural voice if you want them to sound good. A clarinet *can* play very high notes often sound bad, so most of the time, choosing another instrument to play the part is probably a better solution .

This is not the case with MSI. I am not talking about extremities here. I am talking about standard usable ranges. MSI still fails here. For example: the lowest note of english horn is not an extremity, it is widely used in standard repertoire. Same goes for highest semitone of harp, high F of French horn etc. etc.
But this is already covered in another thread.

[yealf]

Hi again, nice to see some responses.
I do stand by what I have to say although papagino is correct in that I was quoting the streaming size not file size.
Having delved a little deeper I have become more immutable in my opinion here. There is lots of bad looping, and a lot of lifeless or just not very well played instruments.

Meeloo:
I see at least a big flaw in your diatribe:
As a professional composer your should have learned from experience that to judge a sample lib by the size of its samples is wrong in many cases. I think a better way to look at this is to have a look correlation of sound quality vs lib size

.
I guess you just didn't really read what I wrote.

Buddhabelly:There is a reason why there are libraries that cost thousands, not hundreds of dollars.

The cost of good players and a good engineer are a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of programming and building the software.

I think people often forget what a sample is. A sustain cello sample instrument is not a synth patch that would use would use LFOs or filters to create expression. It is the sound of a recorded cellist playing to the best of his or her creative ability being triggered by MIDI.
In SI the emphesis on quality of expression and tone just isn't there on my opinion.

[buddhabelly]

Buddhabelly:There is a reason why there are libraries that cost thousands, not hundreds of dollars.

The cost of good players and a good engineer are a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of programming and building the software.

I think people often forget what a sample is. A sustain cello sample instrument is not a synth patch that would use would use LFOs or filters to create expression. It is the sound of a recorded cellist playing to the best of his or her creative ability being triggered by MIDI.
In SI the emphesis on quality of expression and tone just isn't there on my opinion.[/quote]

Yeah? How do you account for the cost of EW GoldXP or Vienna? Neither of them had to pay for software development. Vienna only ran on EXS24 for a long time.

I don't forget what a sample is. I accept it's limitations and work with it.

[yealf]

Nice to hear from you buddha Belly,
---------
Yeah? How do you account for the cost of EW GoldXP or Vienna? Neither of them had to pay for software development. Vienna only ran on EXS24 for a long time.
---------
I could be wrong but I believe Vienna was written for the giga and was giga only untill they made budget versions for software samplers.
Vienna has a massive amount of programming. It has Hundreds and hundreds of instruments and variations of instruments.
Don't confuse platform development with programming a library in terms of cost. I believe SI shares it's development platform with ethno and Mach5 v.2 (if we ever see it) by the way.
I can gaurantee one thing and that is if the Vienna library had used the SI players and original recordings nobody would be using it no matter how good the programming was.
One question, why would you accept the limitations of a bad sample and not get a better one to make your track as good as it can be?

[yealf]

As a P.S. to Buddha Belly....
Check out the "Marcato strings - terrible sounding sample" thread. It's
a few lines below this one. It's nice to know it's just not me........

[yealf]

BuddhaBelly, P.S. number two,
Check out the "Piano sample - It's almost laughable" thread below that,
Oh dear.....

[meeloo]

Anyone comparing VSL with MSI is just out of their mind. Let's be serious guys, we're talking about a product that costs less than $300 with one that costs more than $1500... My feeling is that there is no library that gives this quality for this price tag. Of course opinions ARE debatable and I agree it is also a question of taste, but let's not compare apple and oranges...

[funkyfreddy]

Aside from all of the negativity......

I've found the MSI to be worth the money I spent on it. Some sounds are better than others but I've been getting some nice tracks with it. I don't expect a product like this to replace real players or a real orchestra, so perhaps my expectations are a bit more realistic than others?

[sklathill]

Being realistic is one thing...being usable is another. I think there are some solid sounds in MSI, but the general usability isn't there for me. People may say that I'm nitpicky when it comes to things like the loops and the ranges...but the fact of the matter is that those problems are there, and they hamper my writing style. I like using the full range of the instruments, especially woodwinds, and I like long sustains, modern ranges and plaintive textures.

I've had MSI since October 2005, and I haven't put it to use in any major project I've been on. I've instead used my old standby of Miroslav Mini (Akai) with a handful of Prosamples libraries. Miroslav is only a CD and quite old, but man it works right, and the cheapo Prosamples stuff is pretty decent for what they give you (a decent harp on prosamples orchestra, decent sections in the orch brass CD). Less than 500 for the collection. I was hoping that MSI could replace that...and I found it couldn't.

No, I WANT to use MSI, so I'm going to use it as a supplementary piece to a Synful Orchestra, providing percussion (unpitched and melodic) to the strings/winds/brass of Synful. I've done some test runs and I think they'll mesh together nicely. It's too bad that MSI's reverb is for MSI only, as I don't have a standalone convolution verb of my own. But, eh, I think I'll live.

http://forcedfeedback.com/2006/06/22/ne ... wer-music/

The music link that's a date (20060621) is the Synful plus MSI percussion. It's copious use of Cymbal FX, plus bells, tambourines, metal percussion and bass drum. The other one is the old Miroslav Mini plus extras (including the ever great and FREE G-Town percussion).

[yealf]

I'm with sklathill on this subject. I was hoping SI was going to look at some of the older not expensive libraries like miroslav, sidliochec(or however you spell it) and one of my faves, the ancient but highly usable akai prosonus/Samplecell prosonus. There was so much to learn from those libraries that was almost there but not quite. MOTU clearly didn't. I want to know really, what is the point of putting out a library that's not as good as the older cheap ones that we are all hoping to be able to put to rest after years of hard work. The truth is there really isn't one. I think it's just a big lack of market research and R+D to work out what a new affordable library SHOULD be before charging off and making all the same old mistakes.
What we have here is a new cheapo hyundai competing with a ten year old honda accord. In my opinion, of coarse.